No light in the tunnel

So, in the end, we’re back where we started with the El Bosque UFO footage, dog-paddling in ambiguity. Not that anyone expected a smoking gun — the DNA’s a little hard to acquire. But with so many Chilean government analysts ready to categorize the multiple-angle UFO videos as a legitimate consensus-unknown earlier this year, the latest update from investigative journalist Leslie Kean sorta drains the water from the tub.

Is this a classic flying disc or a near-foreground ladybug out for a buzz? This much we know: There will be no consensus/CREDIT: CEFAA

Kean, whose UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record cracked the New York Times bestseller list in 2010, brought this potentially game-changing incident into the U.S. spotlight earlier this year in Huffington Post. Without getting too sidetracked on the rehash, the incident occurred at an air base outside Santiago in November 2010 during a scheduled military flyby. A handful of cell-phone vids collected footage that, when slowed down, showed unknown objects inserting themselves into the maneuvers, looping around conventional planes at speeds so fast they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Seven videos were reviewed by multidisciplinary scientists for CEFAA, Chile’s official UFO investigation agency, and the panelists agreed the object(s) weren’t man-made.

Unlike the rest of the American media, which didn’t bother to cover the story when CEFAA’s Gen. Ricardo Bermudez previewed the footage at a UFO conference in Arizona nine months ago, Kean stuck with this mystery and published a followup this week; those hoping to classify the El Bosque incident as an ironclad mystery were no doubt disappointed. Two of the most open-minded and circumspect researchers in the States — erstwhile NASA scientist Richard Haines and Bruce Maccabee, a former Navy physicist — were deadlocked over the likelihood of the UFO(s) being flying bugs.

Haines, who published his results at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena website, discounted the insect theory and stated the images “cannot be explained in prosaic terms.” Unable to establish definitive camera triangulation on the objects, Maccabee’s study went the other way. “Without further information that would show the objects were distant and hence large,” he wrote, “it must be considered most likely that the objects were small and nearby such as insects.”

Both approaches appear rigorous and thorough. Entomologists consulted were reluctant to identify the insectoid culprits. Kean cites a photo analyst with Chile’s Air and Space Museum in Santiago commenting on the image’s “defined geometry, not being an object of biological origin, with an inclination that suggests ascending forward movement, this being reinforced by a flash of clear light at the base.” But the bottom line, she reports, is likely intractable: “Each of us can form our own opinions about something that science cannot determine, or we can simply accept that we will likely never know.”

Either way, this is a rare convergence of science and journalism, one so desperately missing from America’s unending conundrum with The Great Taboo. Between now and the long wait before the next time, we’ll continue to choke down the sort of “X-Files” swill ladled out by the likes of Fox 4 in Naples. You know the formula: The glib TV personality asks a witness who grabbed his own cell-phone video, “What do you think it was?” Chuckling self-consciously, the witness responds, “I think it was UFOs, I have no other explanation,” which sets up the stark and standard rejoinder: